GPU Passthrough from Windows 10 to Ubuntu on VMWare Player

Question

Firstly, Apologies if this is the wrong place for this question.

I'm attempting to run ElasticFusion in a Ubuntu VM on my Windows machine using VMWare Workstation 15 Player.

All of my dependencies are good, and the application compiles fine, but when I try to run, I get an error that there are no Cuda compatible devices installed. Seems the VM has no access to my video card, and I can't figure out how to pass it through to the Linux environment on the VM.

I'm pretty new to VMs in general, and have only been playing around with this particular application for a few days, but I can't get it to work.

Maybe I need a different VM? Could I install Ubuntu on a flash drive or something? Would that even allow me to access all of my PCs other devices?(CPU, GPU, RAM, etc..)

Any ideas?

On my PC, I'm using:

• Windows 10 Home
• nVidia GeForce GTX 1080
• VMWare Workstation 15 Player

The VM is running Ubuntu 18.04

Please let me know if you have any questions or need any other info on specs/etc, I'd love to get this to work.

Thanks

Answer 1

VMware Workstation 15 does not support GPU pass-through at the moment. The only VMware product that does support it is VMware vSphere.

Even if it was supported, there isn't any way to pass through a GPU that is being used by the OS the hypervisor is running on, or you would lose the display on the parent OS.

vSphere doesn't use the GPU at all, so the entire device can be passed through to the guest VM.